Most industrial robots available and used today are programmed to faithfully carry out specific actions over and over again with a high degree of accuracy according to programmed routines that specify the direction, acceleration, velocity, deceleration, and distance of a series of coordinated motions. However, it is becoming an increasingly important factor in the modern industrial robot to be equipped with good hand-eye coordination for enabling the robots to be much more flexible as to the orientation of the object on which they are operating. Thus, modern robots may even have machine vision sub-systems to visually identify objects for more precise guidance and also link to powerful computers for smart controlling so as to work in compliance in a hybrid man/machine environment. Consequently, there are more and more resources being put into the development of robotic hand-eye coordination technology that can be adapted for electronics industry, food industry and traditional manufacturing industry, and among which the intelligent automation in the electronic industry is most regarded by the consumer electronic manufacturers in Asia. With the increasing labor cost in China, the need for more advanced automation process is increasing worldwidely. Nevertheless, there is still no adequate robotic hand-eye coordination technique available now to be used in the development of a robotic controller with sufficient hand-eye coordination ability.
Generally, a good robotic gripper should be small, light-weighted, highly agile and formed with realistic outlook. With the development and application of industrial robots, there is a great improvement on the robotic gripper design recently. Nevertheless, in most current robotic grippers, they are designed to have force sensors to be disposed at different positions on their grippers in respective. For instance, in a palm-like gripper, it is generally to have one or more than one force sensors or tactile sensor to be arranged at knuckles or finger tips, and thereby, if it is intended to pick up an object, it is ensured to have at least one such force sensor to be disposed at corresponding position so as to be engaged by the object, so that the engaged force sensor is activated to feedback signals of force or pressure relating to the engagement for assisting the gripper to grasp and hold on to the object. In addition to the force sensor or tactile sensor, another control approach of load current detection can be adopted by disposing current probes on a robotic gripper, by that an evaluation of whether the robotic gripper is engaged with an object is made according to whether or not a load current form the current probes is larger than a specific threshold value.